Stuart MacKay asked "To end with a question - are there still the same
number of birders
starting out as kids, as say, 10 years ago ?"

The American Birding Association conducted a survey of their members a few
years back and found that their survey respondents were, statistically
speaking, the *same* people who responded a decade (or was it 2 decades?)
earlier! In other words, there *wasn't* a cadre of younger birders. I'm
probably exaggerating slightly, but I believe that's what they said.

A friend and I had an interesting discussion about this just yesterday. We
both grew up being empty-lot naturalists, finding a wealth of natural
objects to study--mostly insects, reptiles, and amphibians) in our own
neighborhoods (him in Los Angeles, me in Chicago, if you can imagine empty
lots in those cities; boy, are we old....). We agreed that only a very
small proportion of the kids in our country today were provided with these
opportunities, and we wondered if this would have a substantial effect on
the recruitment of naturalists into the population. Many birders fall in
this category, although, from some of our discussions here, birders of
today may as likely be urban professionals who had little exposure to or
interest in nature as kids (that would be another interesting thread to
follow).

>From my observations, statistically speaking there are no young birders,
just as there are no minority-race birders. The ABA asked how to reach
these groups but wasn't able to answer their question. Victor Emanuel has
an annual workshop for teenage birders, but it includes a dozen or two kids
from all over the country; worthwhile of course but still basically *zero*
kids are interested in birding. Are they interested in nature? I don't
know. Many are getting good training as environmentalists at their schools
or from their parents, but a huge proportion of them are city kids, I
think, without the experiences in nature that I wish they could have.
They're into recycling, and "save the rain forests," and I hope they have
maintained these attitudes when they become part of the 124th Congress and
not lost them at puberty or thereabouts. How can we make birds as
interesting as sex?

Parenthetically, I am heartened by the number of respondents to my CBC
comments who spoke of the rigor of the counts in which they participated.
Perhaps the horror stories that I related are in a rather small minority; I
hope so.

Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416